Pakistani writers are winning acclaim

Saeed Shah in Islamabad
The Guardian,
Tuesday 17 February 2009 Article history

Pakistani novelists writing in English - long overshadowed by literary giants from neighbouring India - are now winning attention and acclaim as their country sinks into violence and chaos.

Tales of religious extremism, class divides, dictators, war and love have come from writers who grew up largely in Pakistan and now move easily between London, Karachi, New York and Lahore. Since the publication of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist two years ago, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a new wave of Pakistani fiction is earning critical acclaim at home and around the world.

Last year came Mohammad Hanif's first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes - a dark comedy about the Islamic fundamentalist rule of General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s - and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, which is set in modern Afghanistan.

Two keenly anticipated works are due out in the UK in the coming weeks: Kamila Shamsie's fifth, and reputedly finest, novel, Burnt Shadows, and a collection of short stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin, who was compared with Chekhov when some of the tales were previously published in the New Yorker.

"Some of us have been writing for many years but suddenly we've had four or five novels coming out together and that's created a buzz," said Shamsie, whose latest work is an ambitious story that starts off in Second World War Japan and moves to post-9/11 Afghanistan. "Indian writing has been established for 25 years or more, since Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie's book, published in 1981). Pakistani writing is very much in its infancy.

"Pakistani writing is like the new young fast bowler on the scene but Indian writing is like the spinner who's been going for years and whose greatness is assumed."

While India has produced Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy, Pakistanis writing in English made little impact in the past. But at a recent literary festival in the Indian city of Jaipur, it was the Pakistani writers there, such as Mueenuddin, who impressed the audience and the Indian media, despite the presence of huge names like Seth.

Pakistan and India remain enemies but the most sought-after commodity in the Indian publishing industry now seems to be Pakistani authors, who are perceived to be be producing a grittier and more engaged style of work.

In recent years, Pakistan has seen a boom in media, opening up a much wider space for public debate. Under president Pervez Musharraf, media rules were liberalised after 2002 and dozens of television channels were launched, many providing 24-hour news coverage. But there are still limits. Although it was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker prize, no Pakistani publisher would dare touch Hanif's book, which was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker, poking fun as it does at the dictator who brought jihad to the country.

A nuclear-armed country of 170m under grave threat from Islamic extremists, Pakistan's constant presence in international headlines has certainly helped the authors get noticed. So while writers like Shamsie and Aslam have been in print for over a decade, only now are they finding an audience hungry for books about Pakistan.

"Pakistani writers look sexy right now because of Pakistan being so much in the news," said Mueenuddin, whose stories describe the stark class distinctions in rural Pakistan. "When I hear of the hottest new Lithuanian writer, my heart doesn't leap. That's a prejudice but it's also true that there is a resurgence of writing in Pakistan."

Readers have embraced the political nature of much of the new Pakistani fiction, looking perhaps for an explanation of the country's turmoil, which has accelerated after it sided with the West in the "war on terror".

"If you've grown up in Pakistan, to sit down and write something that's not political is almost impossible," said Hanif, a former air force pilot. "I'm sure that the headlines make people curious about Pakistan but when they read these stories, I hope it's done on their own merit."

The Pakistani writers causing most excitement tend to be young and from the country's upper class, having grown up in Pakistan in the 1980s. Mohsin Hamid said that, for Pakistan's small English-speaking elite who had been able to live an insulated lifestyle up to the 1980s, coming of age under the oppressive dictatorship of General Zia was a "dramatic wrenching change" that created a fertile ground for writers.

"There's a desire now to dine on Pakistani writing cuisine. It's coming at the same time as some really amazing Pakistani writing," said Hamid, who lives in London.

"Great fiction comes from the tension that produces those dramatic political developments. Pakistan has been going through really interesting times. As writers process that through their fiction, they're coming up with an art with a real urgency and personal need."

A case of exploding sales: the authors on the rise
Kamila Shamsie's epic novel Burnt Shadows tells the story of three families, spanning decades and continents. Stretching from the detonation of the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki in 1945 to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 via India and Pakistan, it's a sweeping narrative with a breath-taking climax. Shamsie was born in Pakistan and lives in London.

Mohammed Hanif's darkly comic first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes - shortlisted for the Guardian's first book award last year - takes as its starting point the plane crash in which Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq died on 17 August 1988, offering increasingly bizarre explanations for the event, from mechanical failure to a blind woman's curse.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection of linked short stories about an extended Pakistani landowning family in Lahore. Daniyal Mueenuddin, who practised law in New York before returning to Pakistan to manage the family farm, has created a revealing glimpse into the complexities of Pakistani class and culture.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid sees Pakistani Princeton graduate Changez buttonhole an American stranger in a Lahore cafe to tell how his high-flying career and budding relationship in Manhattan started to crumble following the attacks on 9/11. The narrative shows how Changez really feels about the attacks. Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton like his protagonist, and lives in London.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/17/fiction-pakistan-hanif